Back in August last year, I received an email I'd been dreading. It was from a senior director at McDonald's.
Back in August last year, I received an email I’d been dreading. It was from a senior director at McDonald’s.
But, as I read it, the email contained no legal threats. Instead, there was an invitation to fly to Chicago to meet the board and build a relationship. What was about to become clear was how the UPF industry uses a vast web of unseen financial influence to protect its lucrative trade — not least through buying influential support and publicly demolishing critics.My book arrived at a moment of maximum frustration with our diet in the UK and found a receptive audience.
Ultra-Processed People became popular because it explained what many people feel intuitively to be true: that food substances wrapped in plastic, made to generate income for massive companies owned by institutional investors, probably aren’t very healthy. I’d take it in such a way that it would never hit my bank account but would go directly to a non-food charity I work with.
But they’re stuck. It’s hard to make money from fruit and veg — but a mixture of flour, palm oil and chocolate flavouring will keep for months in a warehouse, and consumers will buy it enthusiastically. But even while the food industry was trying to buy me, in September last year, a pro-UPF backlash suddenly appeared in the media.
A subsequent report by the BMJ explained these scientists’ rather surprising position: of the five speakers, four had significant relationships with companies that make UPF, including Unilever, Mondelez, Nestlé and PepsiCo. It wasn’t the government, as the headlines implied, but rather the Science Media Centre , a national media organisation that claims to provide accurate information about science for the public and policy-makers through the media. Many, perhaps even most, of the stories you read about science in the press will have quotes taken from the SMC website or will use SMC contributors.
It revealed how the SMC is funded by many of the industries it reports on, including by a food industry body, FoodDrinkEurope , as well as Nestlé and Procter & Gamble . So all of this confusion about UPF came out of industry-funded scientists, speaking at an industry-funded press conference and working with industry-funded charities. I can fill pages and pages with such evidence.
My favourite example is a 2016 review, in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, of the evidence that sugar-sweetened beverages are linked to weight gain and obesity. It can do this because it is impossible to conduct a completely watertight study on the effect of ultra-processed foods on people. In fact, we have never truly proved cause-and-effect when it comes to cigarettes and cancer. Not least because, again, no one could simply get a bunch of newborns and make them smoke like laboratory beagles.
Second, we need to end conflicts of interest, starting with the government’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition. If these proposals seem extreme, you should consider them in the context of the crisis of ill-health and suffering we are in.
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